Scalable Caching Appliances Slash Processing Time for Bioinformatics Applications

BOSTON – April 22, 2008 – Gear6, accelerating I/O for real time application performance, will showcase the benefits of scalable caching appliances for bioinformatics at the Bio-IT World Conference and Expo, April 28-30, at the World Trade Center in Boston. The company will demonstrate how these new solutions enable significantly faster completion times for common sequence-search algorithms such as BLAST, while simultaneously lowering total storage costs by boosting the performance of existing storage systems. Gear6 will be presenting its innovative centralized storage caching solutions in Booth 202.
Resource-intensive, sequence-search bioinformatics applications typically run on large server clusters with tremendous computing horsepower. Despite this computing power, the performance limitations of disk-based storage infrastructure routinely cause significant bottlenecks resulting in:

• A need to over-provision memory across individual clients to compensate for suboptimal performance
• Excessive administration and tuning to maintain minimum uptime thresholds
• Scalability limitations as applications require massive amounts of data and I/O throughput far exceeding the capability of a single storage server
• A need to over-provision capacity to compensate for limited throughput and I/O Operations per Second
• Missed project schedules and potential for lost revenue

Gear6 delivers scalable caching appliances that enhance existing storage infrastructure to seamlessly boost I/O performance without requiring changes to applications. Unlike other solutions that require a complete forklift upgrade of storage equipment to achieve these gains, Gear6 complements existing NAS systems. This approach is particularly well suited for the heavy and random I/O loads prevalent in bioinformatics applications.
The many benefits of centralized storage caching include:

• Blazing I/O response times – data served from cache in microseconds compared to milliseconds from disk
• A scalable architecture that can serve thousands of simultaneous clients and reach terabytes of cache capacity
• An appliance design that complements file-based storage infrastructures without requiring a change of existing storage servers or clients
• Acceleration of bioinformatics application workloads without requiring any application changes
• Lower maintenance costs by dynamically applying performance without requiring excessive data migrations

About Gear 6

Gear6 delivers scalable, centralized storage caching solutions that dramatically improve application performance while reducing total storage costs. By eliminating shared I/O bottlenecks, Gear6 appliances accelerate data center I/O performance and increase server utilization levels to help companies maximize storage and server investments. Gear6 provides unprecedented visibility into how application workloads are influenced by server virtualization, clustered computing and web-scale environments to dynamically improve and manage sustainable I/O performance, even under peak load conditions. The company’s CACHEfx appliances provide real-time data delivery to Fortune 1000 customers in industries ranging from financial services to energy to animation. For more information, go to http://www.gear6.com.